Korean Linguistics 17:2 (2015), 127–131. doi 10.1075/kl.17.2.001int issn 0257–3784 / e-issn 2212–9731 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Introduction Honorifcs and politeness in Korean Lucien Brown and John Whitman University of Oregon / Cornell University Te articles in this special issue on honorifcation and politeness are presented in respectful admiration to the founding editor of this journal, Professor Young-Key Kim-Renaud. Te articles are revised versions of papers originally presented the 22nd Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium at Te George Washington University in May 2014 on the theme of “Language, Power, and Ideology in the Koreas: Honorifcs and Politeness.” Te colloquium was held in honor of Professor Kim-Renaud on the occasion of her retirement from George Washington, where she changed the landscape of Korean Studies and was an inspiration to many scholars in the feld. Te grammaticalization, functions and changing social usage of honorifcs were topics close to Professor Kim-Renaud’s heart; she wrote insightfully about them in papers such as Kim-Renaud (1990) and Kim-Renaud (2001). Honorifc language is one of the many topics where research on Korean has contributed to our understanding of an important general linguistic phenomenon. Korean is well known as a language with a particularly complex honorifc sys- tem, especially in the domain of addressee honorifcation, where between four and seven levels of politeness are distinguished, depending on the researcher, in the modern language. Te richness of the system makes Korean particularly revealing for exploring the relationship between addressee and referent honorifcation. In recent years Korean has played an important part in work on expressive meaning (Potts 2005, Sells and Kim 2006, Kim and Sells 2007), a program which attempts to draw what has traditionally been understood as a subdomain of pragmatics or sociolinguistics, beyond the bounds of truth value defned meaning, into the realm of formal semantics. Linguistic politeness in Korean touches upon multiple domains of linguistics. Te four articles in the issue deal with formal syntax (Pak), diachrony (Sohn), and pragmatics and social meaning (Brown, Lee and Yu Cho). Te diversity of ap- proaches demonstrates that any attempt to understand linguistic politeness from the perspective of one subfeld of linguistics alone is doomed to inadequacy. In this